


Softly Exhaling

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Body Worship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 02:03:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4688309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian takes care of the Bull after Adamant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Softly Exhaling

Bruising on the Bull’s stomach: not so much lines as a mass, his heavy belt spreading the force of the blows. But an angry red angle from the corner of a buckle, a spreading darkness to the skin around it. Along his jaw, too - a little swelling, the bruise itself mostly hidden by stubble, he thinks. **  
**

Dorian looks down at him, mouth a tight unhappy line.

“This,” he says, waves a hand encompassing all of it, marks and the swelling and the care the Bull takes when he breathes. “Does it help?”

“Yeah,” the Bull says, because it fucking does, and it’s not pretty, sure, but pretty’s never been his main selling point. He’s hot, but it’s not the kind of hot that’s going to be hurt by a few more marks.

Besides: the fade sure wasn’t pretty either.

Dorian’s expression doesn’t lighten, but his tone does, which doesn’t mean shit. “I suppose we all have our terrible ways of coping.”

The Bull, who made sure Dorian ended up safe in his own bed the night they got back from Redcliffe that last time, shrugs.

“Hey, it’s sanctioned. Ben-Hassrath stuff.”

“Bull,” Dorian says, “you are admittedly a very good liar, but I’m going to tell you now: you are entirely, utterly full of shit.”

“It  _is_  Ben-Hassrath stuff.” True, but not accurate. Re-education isn’t provoking someone with a stick until they hit you. They both know it.

Dorian shakes his head, and now he just looks tired, and that’s worse. “Do you need me to hurt you? Because I might have to bow out on that one. I don’t know if I have it in me today.”

“Ah, crap,” the Bull mutters. “Course I don’t. You been worrying about that one all day?”

“And If I have?” Dorian says. “Can you blame me? I want—”

He sighs.

The Bull waits his silence out, gives him time, gives him space. Dorian, standing at the foot of the bed, bathed in candlelight, is impossibly gorgeous. It’d be so good to touch him: the beautiful line of his nose, the line of his cheekbones, the muscles of his neck. But he’s in a flighty mood, and he’s got something to say.

The silence stretches. Dorian worries at his lower lip, touches a finger to his mouth. Something softens around his eyes.

“Will you allow me to show you a little care instead?” he asks. Softly, but perfectly clear. There’s his steel. What it must cost him to ask it.

The Bull takes a deep breath, feels the ache of it. Exhales. Thinks about fear.

Can he?

How would it feel?

He had imagined—not that he’d have Dorian hurt him, but that they could be a little frantic together, maybe Dorian riding him, a fast pace, no room for thoughts about anything else. But then again—

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. Sure.”

And for the first time since he stepped into the Bull’s room, Dorian smiles.

Dorian kneels above him, straddles the Bull’s thigh and looks down at him, contemplative. “Magic?”

The Bull closes his eye, thinks about it, serious consideration for a loaded topic. “What kind? Give me a taste.”

Dorian’s fingertips on the soft curve of his stomach, the very lightest of touches. Spreading warmth that eases through him, loosens a little of the knot of soreness and tension that’s taken up residence in his muscles.

He’d thought he’d keep the marks like that for a while, let it be a reminder that he’s alive. But there are other kinds of reminders, maybe.

He looks up at Dorian, who is studying him carefully. “Sure.”

Just for a moment, Dorian looks startled. “Well—good,” he says, all his playful bravado lost. A quick attempt at recovery: a smirk, a little flourish, tiny flames flickering from his fingers and dying. “I am terribly good with my fingers. It would be a shame to deprive you.”

His eyes betray him. He’s touched. But the most significant thing is that the Bull feels a warmth at that which has nothing to do with magic fingers, but which lives instead deep in his chest.

“Lay back, if you please,” Dorian says, and lifts the Bull’s hand to his lips—kisses the knuckles, rubs his thumb across the fingers. Smiles against them, genuine when it can hardly be seen.

The Bull would allow him a lot, for that.

It’s the severed fingers that Dorian lingers over. More kisses, while his hands work tension out of the Bull’s wrist. Fingers dragging over the old scars down the side of his lower arm, a jagged cut from a poisoned blade across an even older burn scar, a little thing, hardly anything compared to some of the others.

What a strange thing it is, this sense of everything shifting between them. In quiet touches, fleeting looks, Dorian’s hands on every part of him. Soothing his aches, tracing every mark upon him. A tremor in Dorian’s hands when they cup the Bull’s face, and his expression is—is so many things at once that the Bull can’t untangle them all. Maybe reverence. Maybe love.

Maybe those are almost the same, for Dorian. But that he looks at the Bull like that—

How does it feel? It’s happening and he still hardly knows. Neither of them are more than half hard, and all the same—it's—

Good. It’s good. Terrifyingly, amazingly, it’s what he needs.

“How many things you’ve survived,” Dorian says, swallows; seems to struggle with the words he wants to say. A little quirk of the lips, to try and make light of heavy words. “You’re something else, Bull. I wanted you for so long. All your strength and softness. Maker, your hands—” he laughs. He’s blushing, flustering over admitting what the Bull already knows.

Dorian Pavus is never serious if he can possibly help it. Apparently he can’t help it now.

A catalogue of every part of the Bull he loves, in quiet, steady words and slow touches, until the Bull is adrift, losing himself in it. Dorian’s lips on his stomach, on his cock, his thighs. His mouth moves against the Bull’s skin, and that sparks through him, heat without urgency.

When he comes it’s slow, a full-body shudder that goes on and on in long deep pulses, and Dorian doesn’t stop touching him for a moment of it.

He feels as though he’s come apart. What shape will he be when he settles back into himself?

There’s no fear to the thought. He’s all here, and terror is behind him where it belongs. Well, that’s new.

When Dorian kisses him, the Bull smiles into it.


End file.
